Citizenship and Voting Rights of Native Americans

This free event features a panel that will examine the impact of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 on Native American voting rights, 100 years after its passage. Panelists will explore the historical and ongoing barriers to voting, the role of state and federal policies, and the efforts within Native communities to secure their right to vote and political empowerment.

This event is co-hosted by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, its Committee for Access, Opportunity & Community Engagement, and the Federal Bar Association Chicago Chapter.

About Torey Dolan (pictured left)
Hastie Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School

Torey Dolan is a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, focusing her scholarship on Tribal Nations, democracy, and American Indian self-determination within the intersections of Federal Indian Law and Election Law. She has co-authored work for the Boston University Law Review and published pieces in the University of Idaho Law Review and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Previously, she served as a Native Vote Fellow at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law Indian Legal Clinic, leading the Arizona Native Vote Election Protection Project during the 2020 and 2022 elections and contributing to litigation on Tribal sovereignty and election law. Dolan holds a J.D. from the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, with a certificate in Federal Indian Law, and a B.A. from the University of California, Davis. She is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

About Jacki Thompson Rand (pictured right)
Associate Professor, University of Illinois

Jacki Rand, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, joined the American Indian Studies Program in 2021, becoming the first Associate Vice Chancellor for Native Affairs at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on federal Indian law and policy, settler colonialism, and global Indigenous histories. Rand is currently working on a book about violence against Native women, drawing from court records, oral histories, and archival sources to contextualize this within the history of a southeastern tribe in the late twentieth century. She teaches courses on Native North American history, federal Indian law and policy, museums, human rights, and public history, and is developing a course on global Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. Rand serves on the editorial board of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Journal and co-founded the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) American Indian Studies Consortium, where she served on the Executive Committee from 2000-2006. Before academia, she worked at the Smithsonian Institution from 1983 to 1994, organizing consultations for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Host or Publisher Federal Bar Association, Chicago Chapter